Make way for clever cuts and fearlessly fake hues—edgy beauty is back

It's long past midnight in the City of Light, and the subterranean nightclub Le Paris Paris is looking very, well, Le London London. The roving party BoomBox—a sweaty, smoky, sardine-packed exercise in sartorial one-upsmanship and the current toast of British nightlife—is in town for a one-night-only Fashion Week appearance. The place is wall-to-wall angel wings, Day-Glo slogan tees, marionette ruffles, and glittery disco frocks. Makeup is maximal and, uh, vaguely fauvist; hairstyles are best described as conceptual. At the center of it all is one irrepressibly kooky, beautiful girl: It Model Agyness Deyn. Fashion's latest obsession is wearing a let's play naked twister linda evangelista T-shirt. Deyn has a Mickey Mouse mask perched cockeyed atop her head, and her lipstick looks like it might have been mixed by Crayola. But one signature in particular is making this Deyn's moment: her gamine, pearly-blond haircut.

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In an era in which the existence of the supermodel—those distinct, individual personas who were so much more than beautiful-but-blank canvases—is endlessly debated, a short cut is fast becoming the quickest way for a would-be Deyn to make her mark. Relative unknowns Marta Berzkalna and Sarra Jane leapt onto the fall catwalks with the help of edgy, interesting locks; elfin 19-year-old Cecilia Mendez catapulted herself to unlikely semistardom with a don't-try-this-at-home, Francis of Assisi-esque bowl cut. At Bumble and bumble's salon in NYC's Meatpacking District, stylist Michelle Fiona transformed up-and-comer Barbara Berger's waist-length hair into a "skate flap" (long, sideswept bangs with a razored under-layer, reminiscent of skate rat Tony Hawk circa 1989) at the behest of her Ford agent. "The minute we started undercutting, you saw all her angles—her cheekbones, her jaw," Fiona says. "With some girls, you get that moment of hair shock—`what was I thinking?' But Barbara was just, `Go for it.' "

Where models and nightcrawlers go, designers inevitably follow. In Paris, Lanvin's show saw models sporting deliberately choppy, raven-black wigs looking for all the world like deranged love children of the Cure's Robert Smith and flapper icon Louise Brooks. And when Marc Jacobs' show (never known for its punctu-ality) started an extra hour behind schedule, rumor had it the delay was due to the time it took to dye a smattering of heads siren-red, black, and, most outstandingly, electric blue.

Bolder and braver than we've seen in years, the new look flirts with notions of gender identity and sexuality—two qualities that can be rather fluid in the modeling industry, but that most actresses can't afford to toy with. So, though a handful of starlets have been snipping away (Michelle Williams, for example, lopped off her long waves à la Mia Farrow; R&B diva Rihanna upped her fashion quotient considerably with a razor-sharp bob), hair's new wave is especially refreshing because, unlike most beauty trends in recent years, it's not another Hollywood dissemination.

"This is coming straight from the fashion world," declares stylist and colorist Laurie Foley, with a note of relief. The owner of L'Atelier de Laurie, a très intime salon in New York City's East Village, Foley, by no coincidence, maintains Deyn's lightning-white hue and masterminded the surprising spectrum at Jacobs' show. She didn't bat an eyelash when the designer insisted on a color she describes as "the sapphire-blue of the sky just before it gets dark." ("If anyone was going to do it, it was going to be Marc," she says.) But while the hue may conjure images of 1980s Manic Panic'd street urchins, this time around such supernatural color is about "futurism, pushing the envelope, but not necessarily rebellion," she says. Thus, even the most eye-popping colors are coupled with simple, thoroughly polished cuts. "Like, on the runway, the girl with blue hair had that shiny, perfect, smooth bob," Foley says. "Or, with Aggy, it's a cool little haircut in an incredibly beautiful, white blond. There's nothing tattered about the texture, and it's not punk color."

Those who aren't quite up for the full monty are finding stealthy new ways to futurize their look. Bumble's Fiona reports an upswing in double-duty haircuts: two-layer bangs that flip one way for a smooth, swept-to-the-side polish and push to the other for short, puckish fringe; and undercuts, or razored-out swaths, sneakily sliced just above the collar line beneath perfectly sweet bobs. (Fresh from the Paris shows, one fashion editor friend pushed up the back of her platinum bob to reveal her own shorn underside. "If I wear it down, no one has any idea," she said. "But when it's up, it's totally tough.") In the early '60s, when Vidal Sassoon introduced his iconic five-point cut—the sheared, glassy-finish shape that catapulted model Peggy Moffitt to superstardom (well, that and Rudi Gernreich's topless "monokini") and which is hugely influential in the current movement—one of his goals was to get rid of the shellacked, hours-under-the-dryer "doneness" of '50s hairdos. But anyone who's ever had a pixie or an abbreviated, razored cut knows that short doesn't necessarily mean low maintenance, especially for those without naturally silky, pin-straight strands. Colorist and hairstylist Mikael Padilla, who doles out what he calls "disconnected, architectural, edgy cuts" at Gamine Silverlake salon in the ultracool Los Angeles neighborhood, says the first order of business is ditching your round brush. "It will make you look puffy," Padilla sniffs, with obvious distaste. Instead, he claims a key part of Sassoon's trademark technique is a classic Denman brush, which has an oval head and nylon bristles that preserve sharp edges during a blow-out, and remains a short cut's best bet. Chemistry is also helping to make angular cuts truly foolproof. Padilla minimized the upkeep of his own razored shag by treating himself to Wellastrate, a new form of in-salon thermal reconditioning that permanently smooths hair. "I'm a surfer," Padilla says. "Now I just get out of the water, shake it, and go."